The process of taking a paper-intensive business such as ACUITY,a regional property/casualty carrier in Sheboygan, Wis., into apaperless environment is not unlike someone trying to break thesmoking habit. It aint easy. The tie to paper is very hard tobreak, says Gary Henderson, a director of information systems atACUITY.

The battle began five years ago and is now near completion. Butunlike some long-term projects, the return on this investment camerather quickly. ACUITY is saving $6 million annually in paperoverhead and facilities thanks to the implementation of ContentManager by IBM, according to Neal Ruffalo, ACUITYs vice president,enterprise technology. We were able to close all of our satelliteoffices and empower our field personnel with the tools to work outof their homes, he says. We have between 150 and 200 remote usersnow.

ACUITY has been an IBM shop for years, even prior to 2001 whenthe company changed its name from Heritage Mutual Insurance. Therelationship didnt keep the insurer from examining other documentmanagement solutions, according to Henderson. He reports foursoftware companies were contacted before the decision was made topurchase what was initially known as IBM Visualinfo but has sincechanged to Content Manager.

The decision was based on two aspects of the Content ManagersystemOn Demand for cold storage and its Enterprise InformationPortal (EIP). IBM was one of the few companies that offered aproduct such as EIP. It gave us federated search capabilities fromone hit list across multiple repositories as well as access tothose repositories via the Web, which is important for our remoteemployees, says Jim Glavan, also an ACUITY IS director.

The savings in time because of better workflow is harder toascertain, but ACUITY knows it is on the right track. We havegained substantial turnaround in time on personal lines policies,says Glavan. We can turn personal lines policies around within 24hours. Recently we installed the same process for commercial lines,and weve been seeing pretty close to a 50 percent reduction inprocessing times for commercial policies. Ruffalo adds, Automatedworkflow is a huge component of all this.

No installation is perfect, and there were some functionalityissues that ACUITY needed to work out. At times you are looking fora document and it comes in upside down, so you need to be able toturn it over, says Henderson. This and other challenges were workedout, including a bar-code problem that was solved during betatesting. One of the problems we had was there were a lot ofdocuments that had [different] bar codes, and depending on how thesystem reacted to [the other bar codes], sometimes it would make[those documents into] new documents that needed to be indexed,says Tina Pokrzywinski, still another IS director for ACUITY. Wehad to find a way to come up with a unique bar code or patch code.We knew what we wanted, and we knew what IBM said it was going todeliver. The two didnt necessarily meet in the middle, and it tooka little time to get to that point.

The personal lines segment of the company has gone totallypaperless now, according to Glavan. As for commercial lines, allnew business and renewals are paperless. Pokrzywinski says internalclaims work is paperless except for recorded statements, which areon cassette tapes. She says the company plans to record voicestatements digitally and put them directly into the ContentManager. Digital photos taken by field reps are already stored onthe system.

Glavan points out the On Demand function allows ACUITY to keeppolicies in PDF files that can be accessed by employees and agentsover the Web. Most of the agencies that use it love it, he says.When you have a radical change like this, some agencies are goingto be afraid to use it, but down the road, more and more will feelcomfortable with it. Robert Regis Hyle

Case File
The Problem:Too much paper and too little productivity.
The Company: ACUITY
Web site:www.acuity.com
net written premium: $418.2 million
Thesoftware: Content Manager by IBM
Web site:www.ibm.com